AidData takes the lid off the shadowy world of foreign aid

by Joseph McClain
| May 10, 2010

AidData, a new public
web site and search engine, will bring an unprecedented degree of transparency
to the complex-and often shadowy-world of development finance.

AidData is a
collaborative effort of the College of William & Mary, Brigham Young
University and Development Gateway, an international nonprofit organization.
The first version of the AidData web portal was launched in March at an
international conference held in Oxford, UK.

AidData is the result
of a merger between the databases of Project-Level Aid (PLAID) and Development
Gateway's Accessible Information on Development Activities (AiDA).
Project-Level Aid is a collaboration between William & Mary's Institute for
the Theory and Practice of International Relations and Brigham Young
University's Political Economy and Development Lab. PLAID was formed after
scholars at William & Mary and Brigham Young University found that existing
foreign-aid sources did not include enough comprehensive and detailed aid
project information to perform their research on aid allocation and aid
effectiveness. The PLAID initiative has received financial support from the
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation,
the National Science Foundation and other sources.

Michael Tierney,
director of William & Mary's Institute for the Theory and Practice of
International Relations, says that AidData currently is designed to be an
"accessible portal" to be used by scholars, personnel in donor governments and
organizations, advocacy groups, people in countries that receive foreign aid,
journalists and ordinary citizens. Open access to aid records will have a
beneficial effect across the foreign-aid spectrum.

"Citizens in
democracies are happy to see some of their taxpayer dollars go to help people
who are starving or dying," Tierney said. "They are not happy to see their
money spent to prop up officials in corrupt governments. Shining a light on aid
transfers reduces opportunities for waste and corruption."

The AidData team notes
that each year, governments and international organizations provide nearly $160
billion to finance development projects in the world's poorest countries. But
large bureaucracies and complicated reporting often make these transactions
difficult for citizens to follow. AidData, by providing innovative web tools
and access to the largest collection of development finance activities in the
world, hopes to shed light on both the triumphs and failures of aid.

AidData nearly doubles
the amount of money in development finance tracked by a single source, from
$2.3 trillion since 1945 to $4.1 trillion. It makes available nearly one
million individual foreign aid transactions, including detailed, paragraph-long
narratives of multilateral aid projects.

In the coming months,
Tierney explained, AidData plans to incorporate new types of foreign aid
transactions, provide social networking tools, data visualization tools and
also will attempt to broaden the database to cover other emerging donor
countries such as Turkey, Cuba, Russia, Czech Republic, Libya and Iran.